Lay My Hat

We are thinking about a big family trip to California next year and have found several places that are of interest but I am not having much luck finding them advertised outside of the "usual suspects". Have tried keywords and image searches but to no avail.

Can any of the US Hatters point me in the direction of sites where you can have direct contact with the owners (without going through a third party who will take a big chunk of commission from both parties) - You know, a bit like Owners Direct used to be

We all hit this problem sometimes when we try to book our own stays. In the past, I've tried hinting in the enquiry (giving my phone number as "plus four four..." or hinting at my email address but you can take a horse to water...

If you're doing an enquiry on a HomeAway site, one thing you could try is to make the enquiry with the StaySavr extension loaded. Then you get some text added to your enquiry that asks the owner to join StaySavr. Now, you'll immediately think that won't work because homeaway will filter out any mention of StaySavr. The way it is written makes it hard for any automated filters to spot. Eventually they may crack it, but for now, I think it still works. If the owner signs up to StaySavr, then you get the phone number and email address displayed on the HomeAway page (thanks to the browser extension).

Yes it does still work, download the extension Anne and you could save yourself a fortune.

http://www.vacationrentalbyowner.net and https://www.calivacationrentalsbyowner.com.

Thanks everyone! As we no longer rent out ourselves, I had forgotten about the Staysavr thing.

I think I am a pretty savvy searcher but having scanned lots of listings on the big sites I'm just not seeing anything which might give me a trail to a personal website and I don't want to start any questions which might end up with the owners being penalised or having their rankings affected (which seems to be the way things are going these days).